FAITH CANNOT CHANGE DNA: PARTITION AND
THE BITTER FRUIT OF A POLITICAL IDEA
"Yeh tank taup ye bombaar aag bandookein,
Kahaan
se laaye ho kis ki taraf hai rookh in-kaa
Dayaar e waaris o iqbal ka yeh taufa hai ?
Jaga ke jung ke tufaan zameen e nanak se
Uthay ho barq giraane kabir ke ghar par ?
Ghulam tum bhi thay kal tak ghulam hum bhi
thay ,
Naha ke
khoon mein aayee thi fasl e aazadi
Abhi tau subah ki pehli hawaaein sanki hain
Abhi shagoofon ne kholi nahin hai aankh apni
Abhi bahaar ke lub par hansi nahin aayee
Na jaane kitnay sitaare bhuji si aankhon ke
Na jaane kitnay fasurda hathhelion ke gulab
Taras rahein hain abhi rang o roshini ke liye
Hamaare pass hai kya dard e mushtareq ke siva
Mazaa tau jab thaa ki mil kar ilaaj e jaan
kartay
Khud apnay haathhon se taamir e gulistaan
kartay”......( Ali Sardar Jafri )
(These tanks, these cannons, these bombers,
these fires, these guns,
Where have you brought them from, and towards
whom are they turned?
Is this the gift you bring to the land of
Waris and Iqbal?
Having stirred the storms of war from the soil
of Nanak,
Have you risen to hurl lightning upon the
house of Kabir?
You were slaves only yesterday, and so were
we.
The harvest of freedom came drenched in blood.
The first winds of dawn have only just begun
to stir.
The buds have not yet opened their eyes.
Spring has not yet brought a smile to its
lips.
Who knows how many stars, their eyes dimmed,
still await the light,
Who knows how many roses of hope lie withered
in waiting,
Still yearning for colour and radiance.
What do we possess, except this shared sorrow?
How much better it would have been had we
joined together to heal our wounds,
And with our own hands built a garden of
flowers.)
The
lines convey a significant and deeply human message to the rulers of Pakistan.
They ask a fundamental question: why should the lands of Waris Shah and Iqbal,
Nanak and Kabir, be turned into theatres of war when their peoples share a
history of suffering, servitude and sacrifice? The poem reminds those in power
that independence was purchased with blood, and that the promise of freedom was
meant to open a new dawn, not perpetuate hatred and conflict. Its imagery of
unopened buds, fading stars and withered roses represents generations whose
hopes remain unfulfilled. Above all, it is a plea to replace militarism and
confrontation with healing, cooperation and reconstruction. The final image of
joining hands to build a garden of flowers offers the rulers of Pakistan a
powerful alternative: nations are not strengthened merely by tanks, guns and
bombers, but by giving their people peace, dignity, opportunity and hope.
Pakistan
has suffered the consequences of
Partition itself. The political legacy of the Two Nation Theory has also
contributed to making the subcontinent a region marked by division, suspicion,
religious polarisation and ideological distance. The men who planted this seed
could not have foreseen the kind of tree that would eventually grow from it.
They imagined that they were planting a tree of political security and power.
What grew instead was a tree of continuing conflict, competing identities and
historical separation.
The
Partition of 1947 was one of the greatest demographic upheavals of the
twentieth century. Millions crossed the newly created borders, families were
separated, homes and property were lost, and enormous numbers of people were
uprooted from places where their families had lived for generations. Scholarly
estimates of the numbers displaced vary, but the scale was unprecedented in South
Asian history.
The
deepest irony is that the Muslims of the subcontinent had evolved within the
same civilisational landscape as their Hindu, Sikh and other neighbours. Their
religious faith was different, but their languages, food, music, customs,
dress, folklore, social institutions and historical experiences had developed
within the same geographical and cultural environment.
A SHARED CIVILISATIONAL GROUND
For
thousands of years, the land between the Indus and the Brahmaputra constituted
a vast and internally diverse civilisational space. Its peoples fought wars,
established kingdoms and experienced religious conflicts, but they also lived
together, borrowed from one another and participated in shared cultural worlds.
A Muslim from Lucknow could have far more in common culturally with a Hindu
from Lucknow than with a Muslim from Arabia. They could speak the same
language, eat the same food, listen to the same music, share similar manners
and participate in the same regional culture. The Two Nation Theory reduced
this extraordinary complexity to a political proposition that Hindus and
Muslims constituted separate nations and could not securely share a political
future. Whatever its political rationale in the circumstances of the late
colonial period, its subsequent history demonstrated that religious identity
alone could not contain the enormous linguistic, regional, ethnic and cultural
diversity of the Muslims of the subcontinent.
THE
FIRST BITTER FRUIT
Muslims who migrated during Partition experienced the first bitter fruit.
Millions left ancestral homes, villages, towns, and cities, expecting a separate Muslim homeland to provide greater security and political
fulfilment. Pakistan's first census in 1951 recorded approximately seven million
refugees, amounting to about one fifth of the country's population and almost
half of its urban population. The new state consequently began its existence
under enormous demographic, administrative and economic pressure. Yet within
twenty-four years the new state itself was divided.
In
1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Bengali Muslims and Punjabi Muslims
shared the same religion, but religion alone could not overcome differences of
language, regional interests, political representation and economic power.
Contemporary historical studies describe the marginalisation of Bengali
language and culture and economic discrimination in East Pakistan as important
elements in the growth of demands for autonomy. The creation of Bangladesh
therefore demonstrated a fundamental historical truth. A common faith does not
automatically create a single nation.
THE
SECOND BITTER FRUIT
The
second bitter consequence was experienced by Muslims who remained in India.
Partition did not remove the Muslim population from India. Millions remained in
the country, particularly in regions such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal,
Kerala, Kashmir and elsewhere. These Muslims became citizens of a country from
which a large part of the Muslim League leadership had sought separation, even
though the individuals who remained had not collectively chosen Partition.
Partition consequently left a difficult psychological and political legacy.
Indian Muslims could sometimes find themselves questioned about an event that
had displaced millions but for which they could not individually be held
responsible. The historical literature also shows that Partition created new
minorities on both sides of the border. Joya Chatterji has pointed out that the
division of Bengal inevitably left millions of Muslims within India, just as
millions of Hindus remained within Pakistan. Thus, a political division intended
to solve the question of communal political security did not eliminate minority
questions. It reproduced them in altered forms.
THE
THIRD BITTER FRUIT
The
third consequence concerns Pakistan itself. A nation needs a positive
conception of its own identity. If national identity is defined predominantly
through negation, through the assertion that ‘we are not India’ or ‘we are not
Hindus’, the question of what constitutes the country's own historical identity
becomes increasingly difficult. Pakistan is not historically empty territory
that suddenly acquired a civilisation in 1947. It contains Mohenjo Daro,
Harappa, Taxila and numerous other archaeological and historical sites
representing civilisations and cultures that existed long before the arrival of
Islam. The history of a territory does not begin when the dominant religion of
its present population arrives. Egypt did not begin with Islam. Iran did not
begin with Islam. The history of the Indus region did not begin with Islam. Islam
became an important and eventually dominant religious force in large parts of
the region, but the civilisation into which Islam entered was already ancient.
Muslims of the subcontinent inherited that civilisation as well as the Islamic
tradition.
THE HUMAN COST OF THE TWO NATION THEORY
The implementation of the Muslim League’s Two Nation Theory culminated in the Partition of British India in August 1947, unleashing one of the largest and most violent forced migrations in modern history. The Indian Independence Act received Royal Assent on 18 July 1947, and the two independent dominions of India and Pakistan came into existence on 15 August and 14 August, respectively. The boundaries dividing Punjab and Bengal were announced on 17 August 1947, two days after India’s Independence, leaving millions uncertain about which country they would belong to. In the ensuing violence, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were killed, assaulted and driven from their ancestral homes. Approximately 14 to 18 million people were displaced, while estimates of the death toll vary widely, from several hundred thousand to around one million or more. Trains carrying refugees arrived at stations filled with corpses; villages were set ablaze, women endured abduction and sexual violence, and families were torn apart in the chaos. Millions abandoned their homes, lands, businesses, places of worship and the graves of their ancestors, often never to return. The Radcliffe boundary transformed familiar regions into hostile frontiers and fractured communities whose histories had been intertwined for centuries. The Partition of 1947 was not merely a territorial division; it was a profound human catastrophe in which a political theory based on religious nationhood was translated into mass displacement, communal bloodshed and enduring collective trauma. Its consequences continue to shape relations between India and Pakistan and the memories of families on both sides of the border.
THE
PROBLEM OF MANUFACTURED DISTANCE
This
creates a profound problem when national identity is constructed by creating
cultural distance from neighbouring India. If the culture of the region is
substantially shared, the temptation arises to manufacture difference through
history, language, dress, manners and ancestry. History may then be rearranged
so that the narrative begins principally with foreign Muslim rulers rather than
with the ancient civilisations of the territory itself. Yet Mohenjo Daro,
Harappa and Taxila are not foreign histories. They belong to the soil of
present-day Pakistan. A child growing up in Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar or Multan
should know that his history is much older than the creation of Pakistan. His
history includes the ancient peoples of the Indus region and the many
civilisations that subsequently inhabited and influenced the land. There is no
contradiction in being Muslim and acknowledging this inheritance.
LANGUAGE
IS NOT ANCESTRY
Language
provides another illustration. Urdu is profoundly a language of the
subcontinent. Persian and Arabic contributed enormously to its vocabulary and
literary development, but its grammatical and structural foundations belong to
the linguistic environment of South Asia. Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengali, Kashmiri,
Pashto and other languages spoken by Muslim populations are similarly rooted in
the linguistic history of the region. The presence of Arabic or Persian
vocabulary does not make a South Asian language Arab or Persian. Nor does
speaking Arabic make a South Asian Muslim an Arab. The same principle applies
to food, music, dress and social customs. South Asian Muslims possess an
enormous indigenous cultural inheritance. Islam is a universal religion. Arab
culture is one particular historical culture in which Islam emerged. The two
should not be confused.
FAITH
CANNOT CHANGE ANCESTRY
The
Two Nation Theory reduced the 5,000-year-old civilisational complexity of the
Indian subcontinent to the political assertion that Hindus and Muslims were two
separate nations who could not live together. Its bitter fruits have been
profound. Muslims who migrated were promised that religion alone could sustain
a nation, yet within 24 years East Pakistan separated to become Bangladesh,
demonstrating that religious identity could not by itself overcome linguistic,
cultural and regional differences. Muslims who remained in India were made to
bear suspicion for a Partition they had not sought, while Pakistan has
struggled with an identity increasingly defined in opposition to India and
Hindu civilisation. This separation encouraged the reframing of history,
language, dress and lineage. Ancient centres such as Mohenjo Daro, Harappa and
Taxila, all within present-day Pakistan, can be overshadowed by narratives
beginning with foreign invaders. Indigenous linguistic forms have sometimes
been displaced by Arabic and Persian influences, traditional South Asian dress
disparaged in favour of imported forms, and communities such as Jats, Rajputs
and Gujjars encouraged in some narratives to imagine Arab or Turkic ancestry.
Yet religious faith does not mutate ancestry. Most Muslims of the subcontinent
remain historically connected to populations that inhabited these regions
before conversion, notwithstanding considerable genetic diversity and varying
external gene flow. Conversion changed belief and religious identity; it did
not transform Punjabis, Sindhis, Bengalis, Kashmiris or people of the Gangetic
plains into Arabs, Turks or Persians. Arab, Persian and Central Asian ancestry
certainly exists in some families, but it cannot reasonably be presented as the
origin of the majority. Faith belongs to belief; DNA belongs to biological
inheritance. A people cannot become historically rootless by changing its
religion.
THE
ORDINARY HUMAN BEING
This
is why the question should ultimately be brought down from political rhetoric
to ordinary human life. Does a farmer in
Sialkot want fundamentally
different things from a farmer in Ludhiana? Does a mother in Lahore want
fundamentally different things from a mother in Lucknow? Their religious
beliefs may differ. Their political circumstances may differ. Their national
identities may differ. But their fundamental human aspirations are remarkably
similar: food, shelter, health, education, dignity, security and a better
future for their children. There is no uniquely Hindu aspiration for a mother
to see her child educated, nor a uniquely Muslim aspiration for a farmer to
earn a decent livelihood. These are human aspirations. This does not mean that
religious or national differences are unreal. They are real and historically
important. But they should not be allowed to obscure the much older layers of
shared civilisation.
THE
POLITICS OF PERMANENT HOSTILITY
It
is also necessary to examine the institutional consequences of permanent
hostility. A state facing a permanent external threat naturally gives
considerable importance to security institutions and defence expenditure.
Pakistan and India have experienced genuine wars, territorial disputes and
security dilemmas, particularly over Kashmir. It would therefore be simplistic
to suggest that every security concern has been manufactured. But prolonged
hostility can become institutionally entrenched. When an external enemy becomes
central to national identity, reconciliation becomes politically more
difficult. A permanent threat can also provide continuing justification for
extraordinary emphasis on defence and security. This is where the legacy of
Partition remains particularly consequential. For sections of the
establishment, peace with India can appear to diminish the political importance
of the very conflict around which national security narratives have been
constructed. The result can be a self-reinforcing cycle in which hostility
sustains institutions and institutions sustain hostility.
THE
LESSON OF EUROPE
Europe
offers an instructive historical contrast. France and Germany fought devastating
wars against one another. Yet after the Second World War, European states
deliberately began constructing institutions of cooperation. The Schuman
Declaration of 1950 proposed pooling French and German coal and steel
production precisely because these resources were central to industrial power
and warfare. The European Coal and Steel Community followed in 1952 and became
one of the foundations of European integration. Europe did not erase its
history. It changed the political meaning of that history. Former enemies chose
institutional cooperation over permanent confrontation. South Asia has largely
failed to make a comparable transition.
We
share rivers, monsoons, cuisines, musical traditions, languages and countless
cultural practices that cross the political boundaries established in 1947. Yet
the psychological boundary between the countries can remain deeper than the
geographical boundary itself.
HISTORY
IS BEING RECLAIMED IN THE ARAB WORLD
There
is another significant development that deserves attention. Across parts of the
Arab world, history is increasingly being treated as an essential component of
national education and cultural self-understanding. Saudi Arabia has undertaken
sustained curriculum reform, including systematic revision of textbooks and
greater emphasis on history, national identity and the development of
analytical understanding rather than rote learning. The UAE has similarly incorporated the
historical foundations of the federation into school social studies and
national education, explicitly seeking to acquaint students with the history of
their forefathers and the circumstances that produced the Union. Ministry of
Education UAE. Egypt, too, continues to place its exceptionally long historical
inheritance within its educational narrative, while scholarship on Egyptian
textbooks demonstrates how historical interpretation has remained an important
part of debates about national identity. This is an important lesson for
Pakistan. A nation cannot build historical maturity by teaching its children
only a selective memory of the past. Pakistani children deserve to know,
without euphemism or ideological filtering, the successive peoples, kingdoms,
invaders, conquerors and defenders who shaped the land on which Pakistan stands
today. They should know where invasions came from, who resisted them, who ruled
before them, how political power changed hands and how indigenous civilisations
responded to successive conquerors. History should neither manufacture hatred
nor erase uncomfortable truths. It should give children the intellectual
courage to distinguish between the land, its indigenous peoples, the invader
and the defender. Only such historical honesty can produce a society confident
enough to examine its past without fear.
THE
DANGER OF CULTURAL ROOTLESSNESS
There
is another danger in the progressive displacement of indigenous historical
consciousness by an imagined foreign ancestry. The child in Lahore should know
the Indus before he knows the history of Arab conquest. He should know Mohenjo
Daro and Harappa. He should know Taxila. He should know the history of Punjab,
Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Kashmir. He should know the poets,
philosophers, rulers, saints, artists and ordinary people who shaped these
lands. He should know the Islamic history of the region as well. One history
does not need to destroy another. A Muslim can be fully Muslim without ceasing
to be a product of the civilisation of the subcontinent. Indeed, acknowledging
indigenous civilisational inheritance does not weaken Islam. It explains how
Islam became part of the extraordinary cultural history of South Asia.
PAKISTAN'S SUBCONTINENTAL IDENTITY VS ARAB IDENTITY
The debate inside Pakistan between an Arabist identity and an Indus or subcontinental identity is old and Justice Dr Javed Iqbal son of Allama Iqbal was one of its most important voices. In his books 'Islam and Pakistan's Ideology' and 'Apna Gareban Chaak' he argued that Pakistan was established on a modern reconstructive interpretation of Islam which orthodox clerics had always opposed and that what Pakistan became after Jinnah was not what his father had envisioned because an Islamic state with equality of citizenship like Medina has never actually been formed and is not acceptable to orthodoxy today, and this view was shared by a large group of Pakistani thinkers including Faiz Ahmed Faiz who insisted Pakistan is heir to syncretic Punjabi and Hindustani culture, Eqbal Ahmad who openly criticised Arabisation under Zia ul Haq, historians Prof Mubarak Ali who said Pakistan's history must start from the Indus Valley not from Muhammad bin Qasim, Prof K K Aziz who exposed the Arab centric distortion in Pakistan Studies textbooks, scientist Pervez Hoodbhoy who criticised Arabisation of education, historian Ayesha Jalal who showed through Jinnah's 11 August 1947 speech that Jinnah treated the subcontinent as one nation of 400 million and identified Pakistan culturally with India, and writers like Tariq Ali and Nadeem F Paracha who describe Pakistan as South Asian not Middle Eastern, and their combined argument is that Pakistan is geographically and culturally a South Asian country whose people, languages, food, dress, music and social structure belong to the Indus Valley and not to Arabia and that in trying to be Arabesque or Persianate Pakistanis become imposters in Arab eyes and orphans in their own land because as a Pakistani writer himself noted 'we have employed religion to distance ourselves from our own land and heritage and in rejecting what we are we are lost, and a large section carries surnames like Syed, Bokhari or Shirazi claiming Arab or Turk origin but an Arab will only smirk at such claims since Arabs still call Pakistanis Hindi from beyond the Indus, therefore the school says Pakistan should own its pre Islamic Indus past and its Punjabi, Sindhi, Baloch and Pashtun roots rather than market itself as an Arab outpost' .
THE
BITTER FRUIT AFTER EIGHTY YEARS
The
men who planted the seed of the Two Nation Theory could not have known the full
consequences of the tree that would grow from it. Their historical moment was
shaped by colonial withdrawal, political competition, constitutional
uncertainty, communal fears and the search for political security. Their
decisions therefore have to be understood within their own historical circumstances.
But their consequences can also be examined critically. Eighty years later, the
subcontinent continues to consume some of the bitter fruit. Hindus and Muslims
have both been harmed by the legacy of Partition. Indian Muslims have sometimes
been asked to answer for a Partition they did not collectively choose.
Pakistani Muslims inherited a national identity deeply influenced by an
unresolved relationship with India. Bangladesh emerged because religious unity
could not overcome linguistic, regional and political differences. And the
subcontinent continues to pay a political and economic price for hostility.
The
danger becomes greater when Pakistan seeks to construct historical continuity
primarily outside its subcontinental roots. The wider the cultural distance
from India is made to appear, the wider the political divide can become. The
wider the political divide becomes, the easier it is for suspicion and
hostility to reproduce themselves in succeeding generations.
WHEN
STATE FANS COMMUNAL RHETORIC
It
is difficult to reconcile the requirements of modern statecraft, constitutional
responsibility and regional peace with the communal rhetoric that has
occasionally emanated from Pakistan’s highest military leadership. Field
Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s Army Chief, while speaking at the Overseas
Pakistanis Convention in April 2025, publicly revived the Two Nation Theory by
asserting that Hindus and Muslims were different in religion, customs,
traditions, thoughts and ambitions, and urging Pakistanis to preserve this
distinction in the memory of future generations. Such a statement is not merely
a historical observation. Coming from the head of Pakistan’s most powerful
state institution, it gives contemporary official weight to a doctrine that was
used to justify the division of British India in 1947. The
significance lies in the position from which these words were spoken. A
military chief is not simply another political commentator. In Pakistan, the
armed forces have historically exercised considerable influence over national
policy. When the head of such an institution presents religious difference as a
defining distinction between two peoples, the statement inevitably acquires a
wider political meaning.
Pakistan
has also witnessed repeated political mobilisation around hostility towards
India, with slogans invoking the destruction of India, perpetual conflict, a
thousand-year war and Kashmir as the country’s jugular vein. Such rhetoric may
generate emotional nationalism, but it can also divert public attention from
the darker realities within the country: poverty, unemployment, illiteracy,
disease, corruption, inflation and terrorism. Mass hysteria over an external
enemy cannot provide jobs, educate children, control prices or improve
healthcare.
The
central issue is therefore not whether Pakistan should remember its history,
but whether historical grievance should continually be used to distract
citizens from the failures of the present. A state demonstrates its strength
not by the intensity of its hostility towards a neighbour, but by the security, dignity, education and opportunities
it provides to its own people. When leaders repeatedly ask citizens to look
towards an external enemy, they should also be prepared to answer a more
immediate question: what is being done to improve the lives of those at home?
THE
HISTORY THAT CANNOT BE ERASED
Pakistan
is a South Asian country whose Muslim majority inherited an ancient
subcontinental civilisation. India is a South Asian country with a large and
extraordinarily diverse Muslim population. Bangladesh is a South Asian country
whose Muslim majority possesses a distinctive Bengali civilisational
inheritance. None of these truths cancels the others. The future does not
require Indians and Pakistanis to deny their separate national identities. Nor
does it require Muslims to surrender their faith. It requires a recognition
that political nations are comparatively recent constructions, whereas
civilisations are older, layered and far more complicated. The subcontinent
cannot change the fact that its peoples share deep historical connections. Religion
can shape faith, values and community. It can change identity. It can change
political history. But it cannot change the ancestry of an entire people
overnight. It cannot turn the Indus into Arabia. It cannot turn Punjab into
Arabia. It cannot turn Bengal into Arabia. It cannot erase the civilisations
that existed before the arrival of Islam. And it cannot make a person
culturally foreign to the land of his ancestors merely because he follows a
different faith.
The
bitter fruits of Partition will not disappear by denying religious differences.
They may begin to lose their bitterness only when religious identity is allowed
to coexist with historical truth, when national identity is separated from
permanent hostility, and when the peoples of South Asia recognise that shared
civilisation is not a betrayal of faith. Faith can change belief. Faith can
change history. But faith cannot change the past. It can never ever change DNA.
( Avtar Mota )
